"The Four of Us"

     My calling card freaked a lot of people out. It was supposed to. It was symbolic.

     When you have to go out and hit, it's reasons.   It's a duty, it's an obligation.   This is probably going to sound weird, to you.

     Nobody wants to be the guy, that retires a good fella.  It's true, the old saying:   "It's just business."   To tell you the truth, it works both ways.

     My calling card.   Sometimes it's just a joke.   Sometimes, it's a prank.   Sometimes, it's a warning.   And sometimes, people used my calling card, to warn me.   So, it's complicated.  It's reasons.

     My name is Michael, and I have a story to tell.   It's about the four of us.   I'm going to watch what I say, because, reasons.  You protect your family, you protect your loved ones, you take care of business when you have to.

     Essentially, you have to think of yourself as a soldier.   You have to be a soldier, until it's not time to be a soldier, anymore.   Until retirement, or until you move up.

     Yeah, but you never get out, though, right?   What's the saying?   Everytime I tried to get out, they pulled me back in?   Something like that.

1

     I was so long out, yet, the intensity of the action, all came right back.  J.D. called, and well, usually, that's enough.   "They was asking about you, Mike." was his way of saying, we need you to come back in the game, Mikey.

     Tonight we met at the diner.   We sat at our usual table, and he spilled the whole plan.

     "Listen, Michael, this is the one that you owe me.   You gotta do this for me, then we're square."

     He was right.   I had to do something for him.   It was hard to swallow the actual deed.

     "Two in the head.   Execution-style.   That's how I want it.   Outside his car.   Feel free to extemporize, but no frills, got it?"

     The waitress came by to check our status.  "How's everything taste, boys?"

     J.D. cut the brief silence by adjusting his leg and farting, loud.  I gave him the smallest laugh possible, just a tight, "huh."  Then I said, "Beg your pardon, miss, may I get the check?"

     Johnny snapped to, and interjected, "Mike, Miiiike, I got the check, okay boy?"

     I slowed my respiration, aware of what was coming next.   He waited until she was out of earshot.

     "Michael, you piece of shit.   You check off until this job is done, got it."

     "You bet, J.D."

     "Okay, now, two in the head.   It has to be next to that fucking car of his.   Make it look like a robbery.   Ransack the house, and rifle through the car.   Make sure you grab his wife's jewelry.   Don't fuck up again, like before.   And make sure you get that fucking laptop."

     "I don't understand why I can't just cap him inside.   What, you want two crime scenes?"

     "Like I said, improvise if you need to, but the body needs to found next to the car, with two in the head."

     "Jesus Christ, Johnny.    Why couldn't you get Pobrecito to do it?   He likes that kind of stuff.   I don't even know the guy."

      "I tell you everything you need to go on.   You have your marching orders, so, get on with it."

     I was badly shaken, leaving the diner.   Somehow, the diner itself was now ruined for me.

2

     I wanted to arrest myself, somehow.   Make myself slow down, just a bit more. Only problem, is, that I feel my progress is already as slow as forward can get. Maybe what I really need to do is stop altogether. Maybe what I need to do, is start moving in reverse.

     It was so easy to see how stuck I was. A blood oath, sworn to a blood brother, is a bond stronger than steel. In many cases, the contract is forged in steel, and executed in blood, later.

     That was the long and short of my situation. Davey had to be killed, and our crew had to be responsible.

     What Juanito was telling me, though, was too incredible to understand.

     As the diner got small in my rear-view mirror, I eschewed my normal route home, and instead went to the beach. At the foot of Beach Avenue, I pull into the lot, and glide in.  The car's transmission alone, tools me into a quiet, meditative corner.

     How do sensitive, reflective men, become killers. It's just business. It's always, "just business," and no made man ever impinges the natural right of another, their daily bread.

     The sun was setting, and I appreciated the touching contrasts. Here, at water's edge, I toe the ocean, and connect with something far greater than myself. Here, at point break, there is a brief, shared moment of joy, where people celebrate the routine division of day into night.

     I want to swim out to sea, and lose all the urgency of the world, but cannot will it.

     I take some footsteps along the shoreline. Very slowly, I move, listening for my resonance. A child shrieks in delight at their game. Far off, a dog barks an excited staccato. All the while, the underlying soundtrack of breaking surf, broken only by the contrasting peals of the gulls.

     As I walk, I notice that my footprints are slowly being carried out with the tide. The first wave erases most of the print. Each successive wave, shapes the sand behind me, as if I were never there. But there is a difference that I am aware of. There has been a subtle shift in the arrangement of the sand. The pattern of my footprints has been 'erased,' however, the impression of my feet upon the sand, can never be erased.

     If only because this brief moment existed, in absolute joy, in my mind.

3

     My reality was stark and terrifying.   Yeah.   I didn't want to go back to prison.   I done my time.  And when Juanito gives an order, it gets carried out.   And no promises, either, other than, "we're square after this."

     That sort of got my mind excited about doing this job.   It feels like fear, and it is that, but it's also what makes me run, in a way.   Settling a score?   I'm in.   Nobody can give me back my kid's childhood, and I accept that.  

     When you go away, nobody is your friend anymore.   "We'll visit you, and write often," they say, but they never do.   Day after day.   Minutes become weeks, hours feel like seconds.   What do you do when every liberty, every creature comfort is denied to you?

     If you know me, you already know the answer to that.   I wrote that story with every righteous hit.

     I called Ellen, and asked if I could come over.   She knew this Davey situation.   I felt a little kept in the dark, and hating the mark really helps.

     "You can come over now, but Johnny can't know.    He's out, talking to you about something.   Just come over."

     So I drive over.   My kid is in the next room, sleeping.   Her kid.   He understands that I am his biological father, but since I been gone, Johnny raised him as his own.   I am Uncle Mike, now.   Whatever.   Literally, whatever.

     When I lost all parental custody over my kid, I was in prison, and utterly powerless to do a damn thing about it.   I cried.   Yep.   I moaned.   I grieved so hard.   You will never understand, and you will never know, what this feels like. 

     "Mike, I know Davey, and you have to do this.   I can't tell you why, or you might not want to do it, or you might get caught, or killed, or something.   I just really want to stay out of it.   But I can tell you he lives in Coronado, like Johnny said.   I also know he goes out on Thursdays, and where.   He'll be gone for hours."

     That nailed it down for me.   This was happening, tonight.   I know all eyes are on me now, and I'm scared shitless, and sort of happy.   This will settle an old score.    Maybe after I finish, these good people might tell me what the fuck is so important about this one.

     These guys are hard to read.    It's a survival skill.   It's an adaptation.    True psychopaths are few and far between.   The dirty work gets done by guys like me, guys without choices.

     He did say, feel free to improvise.   I know how to do that.   My court-appointed psychiatrist thought I was all kinds of mad and bonkers, because that's why they referred me.

     So, when she came to see me, she had certain pre-conceptions.    They look for things like, does this person lack empathy.   Stuff like that.    This tart thought she knew every rhetorical trick, begging the question, like, "why did you feel it was necessary to sever that person's index finger," what.

     This dame has a lot of book smarts, and probably gets a thrill up her skirt, by being a prison shrink.   I pretended to be sexually interested in her, because this works.   It works.   Act like a dumb guy struck by her unique beauty.    Never fails.

     4

     So, I know all eyes are on me.   Johnny is probably got a pair of binoculars trained on me right now, or a sniper scope.   "Ellen, can you tell me why getting the laptop is so important?   What's on there?"

     "Trust me."

      

     And I do, trust her, and my guys.   I missed this, because it's like being in a pack of dogs, you know?   I miss my dogs.    I loved the way we ran together, when we were young, happy men.

     You learn how to feel people, and disregard their statements.    From the point I walked out of Ellen's door, perhaps for the last time, I ditched my thoughts.   I listened to the night, and tried to put all distractions out of my mind.   I was entering the "feel," world, where instincts take over.   Not primal instincts.    My honed instincts, from studying psychology.    I knew what everyone was afraid of.  

     Everyone is afraid and angry all the time, they just mask it.   That's all bullshit, and a man with his finger on the trigger cuts through all the bullshit.

     There was a rusty nail, lying on the ground near the driveway.   Probably fell out of a work truck.   That will work.   I like to collect nails.    When I see a nail in a road bed, I pick it up.   I would want someone to notice a nail destined for my wheels, and pick it up and chuck it away, out where it won't puncture someone's aspirations.

     I drove to Davey's empty house.   This was probably going to be in and out, and it was.   I grabbed the laptop, and some of the jewelry, and pulled some dresser drawers out.   Five minutes in.   

    I'm driving.   I know where Davey goes whoring, it's downtown.   I parked on the street and eyeballed his car.   Nice Mercedes.   Hours seem like days.    It was about one a.m. when he staggered out to his car.    This was setting up to be super easy.

     I followed him down to the island.   There's a self-serve car wash on the way to his house, so I cut in front of his Mercedes, and he just went with it, and drove into the pad in front of the self-service bays.   I pull up alongside, and wave him over to the empty bay.

     There wasn't any fight in him.   He knew who I was, and why I was there.   My reputation preceded me.   "Gonna nail another one down, Michael?"   He knew that it was over, and I was going to do him a favor and make it quick.

     He drove into one of the service bays, and turned around to see what I was doing.   I waved at him to get out, as if I wanted to talk the situation over.   He got out, and stood up, and I just went bang bang, and it was over.   He went down next to his car, and he was gone.   

     There was still leftover foam and suds and dirty water, left over from the last customer at the wash, probably hours ago.   His blood spilled out of his body, and started swirling and joining the suds, draining all the shame away, all the pain.   I chucked the rusty nail in the bushes.   Fuck this.   I'm free now.

    I drove over the bridge, slowed down, and when I got to the top, I just flung the laptop out my passenger side window.   I didn't want to know.   Why spoil it?    I'm free now.

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